John Huston (1962)

Since I last saw Freud (aka Freud: The Secret Passion) I’ve read some of what John Huston had to say about Montgomery Clift’s state of mind and body during the film shoot in late 1961.  Trevor Johnston in his introduction to the BFI screening spoke about this, without actually quoting Huston’s gamy invective, but it’s difficult to keep this out of mind as you watch the picture[1].  The revelations about his medical condition – which triggered the unsuccessful law suit brought by Universal against Clift after the filming of Freud had been completed – made him uninsurable in Hollywood thereafter.  According to Patricia Bosworth’s biography, Elizabeth Taylor put up her salary for Reflections in a Golden Eye as insurance, in order to have Clift play Major Pendleton, but he was dead before the film got made.  (In any case, it’s hard to believe that Taylor’s loyal generosity would have been enough to persuade Huston to agree to direct Clift again.)   His only film after Freud was the European-financed The Defector.  Huston’s dramatisation of the development of Sigmund Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality is far from a great film but Montgomery Clift’s virtual swan song on screen is a major performance.

The weakness is largely in the script.  It was originally written by Jean-Paul Sartre (and long enough for a ten-hour movie) but Sartre refused to have his name associated with the finished product and the screenplay credit went to Charles Kaufman and Wolfgang Reinhardt.  As Trevor Johnston suggested, Huston and the writers seem to want to set up an intellectual detective story, as Freud pursues the truth and struggles with the prospect of facing it.  The trouble with this approach is that anyone who knows anything about Freud is already aware of the outcome (and you wonder how many people ignorant of Freud would have wanted to see the film).  And in spite of John Huston’s pretensions – his own Olympian narrative, the arty titles by James Leong, the involvement of David Stafford-Clark as medical consultant – the journey towards unravelling the mysteries of unconscious motivation and repression takes you through pretty familiar Hollywood territory.  The focus is on Freud’s treatment of a single patient – a young woman called Cecily Koertner (Susannah York) – and his linked voyage of self-discovery.  Cecily’s first parapraxis is striking, and Susannah York does it well, but there’s another within the space of a few lines of dialogue – and that’s Freudian slips covered.  Something similar happens with Freud’s first light bulb moment about Oedipal feelings.  A young man called Carl von Schlossen (David McCallum) displays his father’s military uniform in his room.   The costume is torn, the son having taken a knife to it while his father was inside it.  When the uniform is removed, a woman-shaped tailor’s dummy is revealed beneath and von Schlossen, under hypnosis, embraces it with feeling and murmurs ‘Mother’.  The sequence is a good example of Huston’s ability to elevate the material by the creation of a striking image – even when the idea that the image is designed to illustrate is pretty obvious.  The same goes for the larger visual scheme of the film – centred on doors and eyes opening and closing, on dark streets, on picturing waking life in a way that blurs the boundaries between it and dreams.  (Douglas Slocombe was the DoP.)   Freud’s recurring dream of being pulled down into a cave would be more impressive without the electronic music by Henk Badings that accompanies it.  (Jerry Goldsmith was Oscar-nominated for the main score but went on to write better music for films with less self-consciously world-shattering subjects.)

The acting in the supporting roles is uneven.  Although occasionally too self-aware, Susannah York gives one of her best performances in the stretching role of Cecily.  Her curious blend of innocence and lewdness means that York was rarely better cast.  She and Clift get a real rhythm going in the longer sessions between Cecily and Freud.  Rosalie Crutchley is superb as Freud’s mother – her gravely beautiful face suggests The Mother as well as this particular one yet her playing is completely natural and believable.  The fact that she and Clift look the same age makes sense too (they were in fact exact contemporaries, both born in 1920).  Needless to say, Frau Freud senior also appears as an emblematic female figure in her son’s dreams.  Susan Kohner has a troubled, sometimes touching naivety as Freud’s wife Martha but Larry Parks is a stodgy Josef Breuer and Eric Portman can’t do much with his cameo as a doctor who dismisses hysteria as fashionable malingering.   A sequence in which Cecily’s mother (Eileen Herlie) reveals her past is crude and the staging of Freud’s final lecture to the massed ranks of Vienna’s medical establishment is botched.  Freud seems to be talking to himself:  it’s hard to see why the audience is so offended if they can’t hear him.   The jerky rhythm of the narrative and lack of clarity about how much time has passed between sequences may be Universal’s fault rather than Huston’s (the studio cut nineteen minutes from the movie).

Clift is effortlessly magnetic – and in this instance it isn’t because his looks are so altered.  Indeed, this is the only post-accident film in which, perhaps with the help of a concealing beard, he’s handsome in a way that brings back the pre-accident look.  He still appears older than this Freud is meant to be but not to an extent that it’s a problem.  (If he looked the way he did in some of his other later films he’d seem old enough to be Rosalie Crutchley’s father.)  He’s the best possible actor to give physical intensity to – and alchemise the cliché of – Freud’s wrestling with his conscience.  He does amazing things with his eyes both when they’re gazing penetratively and in how they register, quick as lightning, a new and frightening thought.  The characterisation is marvellous in more surprising ways too.  Given that he was reckoned by Huston and others to be completely out of control, Clift’s Freud is extraordinarily alive mentally – he conveys both the intellectual thrill and the emotional threat caused by the theories he’s developing.  Clift also gives him warmth and humour – and, in the company of his wife, an appealingly callow self-regard.  (When Martha says, in a tone of worried reproof, that no one else in Vienna probes his patients the way Sigi does, he replies, pleased as punch, ‘Perhaps no one else in the world!’)  Huston’s voiceover is a striking antidote to Clift’s charm.  In the film’s foreword, he seems to be an authoritative but anonymous narrator, invoking Copernicus, Darwin and Freud as the three great dismantlers of human vanity.  Later on, however, he’s the speaker of Freud’s inner thoughts.  It’s understandable that, once shooting had finally ended, Huston wasn’t prepared to give Clift another opportunity to protract the making of Freud and take it further over budget – and the invincible authority of Huston’s voice corresponds more than Clift’s portrait does with received ideas of Freud’s intellectual dogmatism.  But the originality and daring of Montgomery Clift’s acting chimes with Freud’s pioneering achievements in a much more exciting way.

28 February 2013

[1] The quotes in Amy Lawrence’s The Passion of Montgomery Clift, taken from a biography of Huston by Lawrence Grobel, include: ‘His behavior was simply revolting.  He had a plastic bottle filled with grapefruit juice and vodka.  I never took a drink out of it.  I didn’t want to touch anything that his lips were near … There was brain damage there and he couldn’t remember a line.  He was revolting.  It was a combination of drugs, drink, his being homosexual, the whole thing became a soup that was gag-making’.